Passive House Canada is embarking on a major new training program for construction professionals and trades, aiming to apply top-tier design principles to the large, complex buildings where they’ll have the greatest impact on emission reductions and energy performance.
The three-year, C$1.6-million program, funded by Natural Resources Canada’s Code Accelerator Fund, will support virtual training for building officials, in-person training for airtightness field testers and designers, and technical assistance for component manufacturers, the organization said in a release late last month. The ultimate aim is to make high-performance building products more easily available and boost local capacity to install them and meet upper-tier building codes.
The training is crucial when knowledge and capacity in the building sector “lag behind evolving regulations and policies, leading to project delays, increased costs, and slowed market advancement toward higher national building codes,” the organization wrote. “Many municipalities outsource high-performance building site plan reviews due to in-house officials’ unfamiliarity, resulting in higher costs and delays.”
The new program is also meant to address “a significant lack of trained designers and field testers equipped to conduct large building airtightness testing, crucial for code compliance and verifying outcomes of high-performance buildings.”
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation has committed more than $1.5 billion for high-performance features in new and retrofit housing through 2028, putting providers “under pressure to comply with stringent funding requirements and greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets, the release stated. “However, the market has not yet transformed quickly enough to supply the necessary high-performance windows, building systems, and ventilation components.”
More Emissions Cuts, Faster
The Passive House (in Germany, Passivhaus) standard is more often applied to single-family homes, and passive solar design conferences dating back at least as far as 1980 have focused pretty much exclusively on detached, semi-detached, or tract housing. But Passive House Canada is homing in on building archetypes where it can cover more ground and cut more climate pollution, faster, CEO Chris Ballard told The Energy Mix.
“Canada has become well known around the world for design and construction of very complex, large buildings and towers, not just single residences,” he said. “One of the things we’ve heard from industry is that it’s all well and good to do a blower door test on a single-family home. But once you get into a complex building, whether it’s as simple as a car dealership or as complex as a 60-storey tower in downtown Vancouver, you need different expertise, and we don’t want a lack of expertise to hold anyone back.”
Ballard cited two reasons that social housing providers have been among the biggest adopters of passive house construction. “It provides a superior living environment for people who may already have some trauma in their life, providing them with a very comfortable, quiet place to live that is conducive to their healing,” he explained. “The other reason, of course, is that it saves them a lot on energy and maintenance costs, and they can reinvest that money into building even more accommodation for people who are experiencing homelessness.”
That focus, in turn, “will allow us to continuing reaching out to the manufacturing sector, because there are passive house components that need to be developed and manufactured here in Canada, everything from windows to heat recovery ventilators (HRVs) to air-source heat pumps,” Ballard added. “There’s huge and growing need for it, and part of what we want to do is demonstrate to industry that now is the time to invest in manufacturing.”
Building the Supply Chain
Already, said Passive House Canada project manager Jeff Clarke-Janzen, skyrocketing demand for high-performance building components is forcing suppliers to source them from overseas, creating long lead times that make it hard for builders to deliver on competitive timelines.
Ballard said his organization has shifted its narrative to talk about carbon footprints, including the embodied carbon in different building designs and methods, as well as the passive house standard’s emphasis on greater circularity.
“But I’ll tell you, nothing gets governments more excited about the transformation than when you talk about the potential for job creation and investment in jobs,” he said. “That’s what gets them excited when you talk about social housing.”
When Toronto Community Housing estimated in 2019 that the first phase of its redevelopment plan would require 200,000 passive house windows, “my question to city councillors was: where are they going to be built? If Toronto and Ontario taxpayers are paying for this redevelopment, where the windows, the doors, and the air handling systems going to be built? They should be built in Toronto. If not Toronto, then in Ontario, and if not Ontario, then in Canada. When you use those numbers together, suddenly there’s a scramble to combine green building standards with economic development strategies.”
‘Code-Built Crappy Homes’
Ballard and Clarke-Janzen said Passive House is a great opportunity for architects, engineers, and front-line trades to futureproof their careers by training to the highest standard in leading building codes, like British Columbia’s Step Code.
Those top standards aren’t mandatory today, but “if you’re trained to the Passive House standard, you can build to any other standard that exists,” Ballard said. For many trainees, the biggest question is why they would want to.
“I love going to the trade courses where the framers are paying out of their own pockets because they want to build something different,” he said. “They’ll tell me in jest, ‘hey, thanks a lot, you’ve ruined me! I can never go back to framing the way I used to, because I can’t unsee it now’.”
Those trainees are going back into framing jobs with companies that are “throwing up tract-built houses,” what one Canadian passive house pioneer calls “code-built crappy homes,” Ballard told The Mix. But after seeing how much more they can do, “they’re trying to figure out how to incorporate as much of the passive house sealing and wall assembly as they can,” talking to their union reps and job site colleagues about what else is possible.
“They don’t pull their punches. If it’s crap, they say it’s crap,” he said. “And they’re saying, ‘I can’t build crap anymore’.”
